In today's health care, maintaining health and preventing outbreak of disease is a primary goal. In this regard, both preventive measures to be taken and measures for treatment are in general important, especially for multifactorial diseases, which are largely brought about by the present life style. By multifactorial diseases it is referred to diseases involving or depending on by several factors or causes, for example pertaining to a condition or disease resulting from the interaction of many different genes. One of the problems in modern health care is to identify individuals at risk and to prognosticate their disease outcome, which naturally may be associated with difficulties with regards to achieving a relatively high identification accuracy and/or predictive power, especially when it comes to multifactorial diseases.
As a specific example, periodontitis is a multifactorial infectious disease in patients with a polygenetic predisposition. Predictors from three categories (primary etiological, host, and modifying predictors) interact to reinforce or attenuate the effects of each other. They influence growth and/or composition of an indigenous pathogenic bacterial plaque or biofilm that has been identified as the primary etiological predictor of periodontal disease (which biofilm in turn elicits an inflammatory response), or the inflammatory response itself. However, there are also host predictors as well as a number of predictors that influence the patient's susceptibility to periodontal disease and modify disease progression. When predictors such as these accumulate and work in synergy, episodes of disease development or progression may occur. Consequently, because of the complex nature of the disease, unaided risk assessment and/or prognostication of periodontitis generally exhibit significant variability between different clinicians carrying out these procedures.
Similarly, unaided risk assessment and/or prognostication of other multifactorial diseases, associated with respective predictors that generally interact to reinforce or attenuate the effects of each other, generally exhibit significant variability between different clinicians carrying out these procedures.
In order to obtain a relatively high accuracy and/or predictive power in schemes for risk assessment and/or prognostication of development or progress of multifactorial diseases, such schemes generally require identifying and taking into account several predictors that influence the patient's susceptibility to disease and modify disease progression.